The information age has facilitated an era of building informative slide presentations utilizing presentation software applications. However, the way in which previous file formats are created and structured to store a collection of graphical surfaces, typically called a presentation, has several drawbacks. For instance, previous presentation file formats are created in the form of a single file containing monolithic data. Because proprietary formats are generally used to create these single files, each company that builds presentation storage develops a different file format. Because the data within these different file formats is monolithic and inaccessible in discrete parts, a series of problems are created.
One problem is basic document or slide re-use. For instance, it is very difficult to extract one or more slides from a presentation and reuse the extracted slides in a different presentation and retain slide integrity, even in the same application. Comparatively, reusing slides between different applications, for example from POWERPOINT to HARVARD GRAPHICS, and HARVARD GRAPHICS to FREE LANCE GRAPHICS, is worse. Reusing content on a slide is similarly difficult.
Secondly, because of the single file format, it is practically impossible to lock part of a presentation. Thus, a feature such as multi-user editing, where a number of people perhaps on different platforms, and/or from different locales cooperatively edit a presentation with the help of a locking mechanism, is prohibited. Most of the technology in terms of locking is all done at the file level, thus if a file is locked by a user, no other users can edit the file. Viewing is possible, but not editing.
There is also a problem of document interrogation. Finding content within a presentation, for example finding slides for a 2004 sales forecast, can be a daunting task. It is very difficult to find discrete parts within a monolithic file format presentation where semantics of the content can be determined. Even if a tool is built to interrogate one previous file format, the same tool could not be used to interrogate a different previous file format. This problem exists even when an existing binary file format is documented. It is still difficult to implement reader and writer classes that can handle existing binary file formats well. Even if a tool targeted at an application was developed it could not interrogate all document formats. This problem is referred to as the opaqueness of single file formats.
Still further, due to intermingling of data, the ability to re-brand a presentation, or multiple presentations, is nearly impossible outside of the presentation application. Re-branding a presentation involves taking a slide from presentation A, moving it to presentation B, and making the slide look as though it was authored in the normal authoring context of presentation B. Although, the slide may pick up some colors from the presentation B, the slide will not be displayed as though it was actually authored in presentation B.
Document surfacing, the ability to take pieces of one file formatted document and drop them into another document, is also a problem. For instance, a spreadsheet table copied from a spreadsheet document into a presentation document is difficult to interrogate in a monolithic style file format.
Still further, in the case of document previewing, for instance graphically browsing accessible content, it is very difficult to retrieve a high resolution preview of the content exposed through a shell in a browser or in a third party application. Some presentation applications provide thumbnails or previews of a single slide, but none provide high-resolution previews of all of the slides in a presentation deck.
Accordingly there is an unaddressed need in the industry to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.